The Seas
Ratings22
Average rating4.2
Ever since her father walked into the ocean eleven years ago, a young woman waits for him to return. Life in her coastal town is decidedly bleak. Her mother spends her time quietly monitoring the ocean for her missing husband. Her grandfather passes the days typesetting dictionaries that will never be printed. Rather than suffer the contortions of becoming a woman and accepting her father's apparent suicide, the narrator convinces herself she is a mermaid and escapes her dreary, northern town life via a fantastic myth. When not chambermaiding at decrepit motels or dreaming of becoming a scientist, she dedicates her time to falling obsessively in love with Jude, a drinker and a sailor twice her age who bears more than a passing similarity to her father. She knows Jude has a troubling secret that will, when revealed, help to fulfill the narrator's peculiar sense of her identity. Part modern gothic, part coming-of-age story, The Seas explores the very real possibilities in the unreal, straddling the horizons between the ocean and the land, literature and science, wishing and reality.
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One sentence synopsis... Growing up fatherless in a dreary, alcoholic, coastal town a young woman who believes she's a mermaid falls hopelessly in love with a returning Iraq war veteran. .
Read it if you like... stories that flirt with magic realism, unreliable narrators, or complex female characters (think Ottessa Moshfegh “heroines”). .
Dream casting... Jamie Bell as the good-hearted but traumatized Jude and Thomasin McKenzie as the unnamed narrator.
The Seas is a coming of age novel that has a dream like quality to it. Sometimes it feels like we are experiencing the text in a manner quite like the narrator experiences life. We cannot tell what is real and what is fantasy, each blurring seamlessly into the other.
The tone throughout the book was one of tragedy and loss in a small seaside town where alcoholism is a hobby and there seems to be no future readily available. The narrator is a young girl of nineteen who believes she is a mermaid. She is in love with an older man who is a war veteran and she believes she will bring about his death.
I read this novel not expecting it to be so fantastical. I almost gave up on it because while it was beautifully written, it was a difficult read and it took a while for me to get through the first part. I am glad however that I stuck with it, because near the middle it suddenly clicked with me and I finished the rest in one sitting.
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